Analysis of the Hopelessly in Love
by CrestfallenCatharsis
Summary: "He'd travel the entire span of the space keeping them apart and she could still never get close enough." In which Maka has a habit of sitting way too close to Soul, and he has a habit of thinking way too much about it. For SoMa Week 2017! -Oneshot-


**Disclaimer: I do not own Soul Eater or any of its characters-they belong to Atsushi Okubo. SoMa Week Day 4: Habits.**

 **XxX**

They say it takes twenty-one days to get rid of a habit, sixty-six days to form one. What they don't tell you is how long it takes to fall in love with one. He's still trying to figure out when that happened. Perhaps he always was, or perhaps her little actions got to him overtime. Either way, he was in deep, now, and there was no getting rid of it.

He sat beside her, the television blaring in front of them. He tried to watch, but his head was buzzing at the thought of her next to him. She had her legs crossed, and he was doing his best not to react to her knee grazing his thigh. Every once and a while she would readjust, and he swore every time she got closer. God, the couch felt like a desert and they were on opposite ends. He'd travel the entire span of the space keeping them apart and she could still never get close enough. Clearing his throat, he swallowed the thought of spreading his legs farther apart to fill the area between him and her knee.

"Soul?"

He kept his eyes glued to the screen. He hummed a response, trying to keep his cool. "Hmm?"

"How many people have you kissed?"

His heart thudded in his ribcage like a rabid animal trying to escape capture. "Dunno. You?"

The truth was he did know. He knew he had kissed exactly zero people in his eighteen years of life. I mean, it's not like this line of work warranted steady relationships, right? He'd been hit on before, sure, gone on a few dates, but kissed? Never. Although, he never really _wanted_ to kiss them, either. The only person he had ever had the inkling to kiss was-

"Me? Oh, well, none," she answered. He nodded, his heart returning back to its normal rate. Well, as normal as it could be with Maka sitting so close to him. "That's kind of embarrassing, huh?"

"Nah," he replied. Honestly, he was relieved. She sighed, then directed her attention back to the book she held in her hands. He stopped asking why she would ask strange questions out of the blue; the answer was usually always something vague that he didn't understand.

His eyes were still on the T.V. screen, but he hadn't known what he had been watching for thirty minutes. He was more interested in the fact that the desert between them was getting smaller and smaller with each shift of the body. He stole a glance her way.

There it was. Her habit he was so engrossed by every time she performed it. He watched maybe too intently as her teeth held her bottom lip in their grasp. The stark white teeth contrasted with the deep pink as they slowly scraped the plump flesh until it popped out of their hold. Immediately following came the quick movement of her tongue across the bitten area. It glided across the lips so smoothly, leaving a wet shine in its wake. Suddenly, the space in between felt less like a desert and more like a raging ocean, and he wanted to jump in.

So, he pulled the cheesiest move known to existence: the yawn and arm stretch. He attempted the most convincing show of tiredness he could, his mouth opening up in a giant _O_. Although, instead of putting his arm around her shoulders, which was sure to give him a heart attack, he placed it on the back of the couch behind her head. Her hair tickled his forearm, but he refused to move, not daring to test his courage any more than he just had.

During his cliché action, it dawned on him that he had shifted slightly closer to her, and her knee now laid on top of his leg. His breath hitched in his lungs. Out of his peripherals, she didn't seem to notice the change. Was it something to take notice of? After all, they had touched each other on dozens of occasions during combat. They've held hands lots of times before he transformed into a weapon. Of course, those moments made his stomach churn, too.

"Ow," Maka whispered. He turned his head to face her, concerned.

"What? What happened?" he questioned. He heard the panic in his own voice and realized he should tone it down. Geez, they weren't in a fight. The only battle currently being fought was between his heart and his brain-a battle in which both sides were unequivocally losing.

"Oh, it's nothing. You were just pulling my hair a little too hard is all."

Her hair? He looked to the side of her head. Sure enough, there was his finger, encased in blonde strands at the tip of the pigtail. In all his internal dialogue, he apparently failed to notice he had literally wrapped her around his finger.

"S-Sorry," he stuttered, instantly unraveling himself. "I didn't even know."

"You don't have to stop."

He blinked. "Uh, wasn't it hurting you?"

"Just because you pulled too hard that one time," she argued. "You play with my hair a lot. It's become pretty relaxing."

He does? Since when? He gingerly took her pigtail back into his grasp and looped it around his finger, giving her an is-this-okay? look. She smiled, making his ears burn, and returned to her novel. He watched her teeth and tongue work her lip one final time before ripping his eyes away to stare blindly at the colors on the screen. Eventually, he became unaware of his finger-twirling yet again, but he felt her knee on his thigh for the remainder of the evening.


End file.
